Organ transplantation is the transfer of tissue or an organ from an original site to another to replace damaged tissue or organ. The organ transplantation may have various problems, one of which is ischemic tissue injury due to ischemia-reperfusion (IR). The ischemic tissue injury caused by IR occurring in the organ transplantation results in delaying the recovery of renal function after the organ transplantation, which causes an inflammatory tissue reaction often serving as a prognostic factor that is bad for long-term maintenance of the function of the transplanted organ. Early IR injury incidentally occurring in the organ transplantation may lead to subsequent deterioration of the organ function and transplantation failure.
Particularly, lung transplantation is known as the sole therapeutic option for terminal lung diseases, and it is expected that patients' demands for lung transplantation will constantly increase. However, despite steady medical advancement, lung transplantation survivability is still not higher than other organs. The most frequently occurring problem at the early stage after a lung transplant is graft dysfunction, one cause of which is an IR injury.
Meanwhile, a flap is a piece of skin or tissue with a pedicle or tissue similar thereto, which is transferred from one site to another site of the body, the transferred tissue capable of surviving in the pedicle or tissue similar thereto. Flap surgery is a surgery technique that is most widely used in plastic and reconstructive surgeries for soft tissue defects or chronic wounds, which cannot be dealt with through skin transplantation, and useful for reconstructing an appearance and lost function, and particularly, the flap surgery can rapidly restore the defects or wounds by a primary reconstruction through transplantation of a combination of various types of tissue such as bones, tendons, muscles, and nerves. In the flap surgery, flap survivability is closely related to an IR injury treatment. Therefore, it is expected that a method for stably enhancing the flap survivability through the IR injury treatment will be very useful.
Also, cell transplantation, similarly to organ or tissue transplantation, is carried out to treat a disease, and as a representative example, transplantation of cells in the islets of Langerhans for improving type 1 diabetes may be used. Within the first week of the transplantation of the islets of Langerhans, most of the grafts are lost, which may be because they are exposed to various stress factors such as hypoxia, and to proinflammatory cytokines and free radicals before secondary angiogenesis after the transplantation.